Comets, Stars, the Moon, and Mars: Space Poems and Paintings

Planetary matters

BookPage® Review by Alice Cary

A wonderful book for elementary students learning about space and astronomy is Douglas Florian's Comets, Stars, the Moon, and Mars: Space Poems and Paintings. Florian is a master at creating collections of his own poetry and paintings, and his latest offering is chock-full of facts (the sun is Ninety-three million miles from Earth. / Nearly a million miles in girth. ), but it's also full of fun. A poem about a galaxy is shaped in a spiral and explains just what a galaxy is. There are poems about each planet, including lines like Pluto was a planet. / Pluto was admired. / Pluto was a planet. / Till one day it got fired. A concluding galactic glossary gives additional information about the topics covered in each poem. The artwork is rich and luminous, with deep blues and earthy reds, yellows and oranges. Some pages have holes so readers can see through to the next page, much like gazing through a telescope at the universe.